“Bail Out the Writers”
The New York Times Review of Books Sunday has this amusing back page column by Paul Greenberg. Here’s how it begins:
A little while back my daughter told me the following depressing joke:
Woman: What do you do?
Man: Me? Oh, I write books.
Woman: How interesting! Have you sold anything recently?
Man: Why, yes. My couch, my car and my flat-screen television.
A veteran TV writer once posted something on a writing BBS (paraphrased): “One thing a working writer knows with certainty: There will be times when they won’t be working for a living. It’s up, it’s down, you’re flush, you’re broke. That’s how it is for most working writers.”
I was reminded of that when I read Greenberg’s piece because he included in it this rather astonishing factoid:
How many people support themselves as writers?
185,000 people in the United States who support themselves primarily as writers of books, plays, poetry, speeches and other literary matter.
185,000! Doesn’t that seem like a lot of writers? There are around 12–13,000 members of the entire WGA (West and East) of which less than half are making money as writers at any given time. So 185,000 rather shocked me.
The sheer numbers led Greenberg to conclude that writers need a bailout… sort of. He would rather see an approach akin to the agricultural business whereby farmers are subsidized not to grow certain crops.
According to the industry tracker Bowker, about 275,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year. Let’s say we want to eliminate half of them. Assuming it takes about two years to write your average book, we would offer book writers two years of salary at the writers’ average annual income of $38,000 a year. Add it all up and you get a paltry $10.5 billion to dramatically reduce the book overcapacity.
It’s a fun article, well worth reading. But let me ask: How much would you need to get paid not to write?